The Red Taylorist

The Life and Times of Walter Nicholas Polakov

Diana Kelly

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781787699861
• eBook ISBN: 9781787699878
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: Business

The Red Taylorist traces the adult life and works of Walter Polakov, focusing on his socialist scientific management ideals and the ways these were constrained by conventionality in the USA in the first half of twentieth century. Tracing Polakov's activities and achievements, this book explores the contradictions of a prolific writer, socialist engineer and scientific management ideologue in the decades until his death in 1948. 

Written from a management history scholarly perspective, it presents a unique and detailed viewpoint. There have been no prior biographies on Polakov, and very few on his fellow scientific managers, consulting engineers, or like-minded public intellectuals. Moreover, perceptions of scientific management or Taylorism have tended to emphasise the negative impacts on workers, whereas Polakov's socialist commitment suggests a much more nuanced approach. 

Aimed at scholars of management and history of management, Diana Kelly offers a detailed narrative of this important individual, while greatly enriching understanding of the broader historical and industrial context.

Chapter 1

The Russian Engineer Comes to New York, 1905–1915

Introduction

Walter Nicholas Polakov was one of thousands of Russian immigrants in 1906, most of whom had migrated after the failed 1905 revolution or as a consequence of the major pogroms in the Russian Empire. Many immigrants tended to build their ethnic communities on arrival, but Polakov was unusual in avoiding most other Russians, and instead, seeking to join the engineering and scientific management communities. From the start, Polakov set himself to become successful and also to bring socialist ideals to the United States. He began by being useful to his senior colleagues and early mentors who had impeccable links to business and industry. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of Polakov’s background, then offers an overview of New York City when Polakov arrived. It was not only a swirling melting-pot in an epoch of progressivism, muckrakers and optimism, amid flourishing growth, but also an epoch of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire, densely populated tenements and appalling stories of exploitation. Within two years of arrival, Polakov was working for, and with, some of the most notable engineers and efficiency experts in the United States, including Henry Laurence Gantt, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, and Harrington Emerson. By World War I, Polakov had published some titles in professional journals, was setting up his business, and had adopted a daughter. As well, his wife had left him for his Russian colleague and co-author, William Russell.

Arrival

The winter in New York was cold, and on Boxing Day in 1906, the temperature was 29°F (New York Times (NYT), December 27, 1906) when Vladimir Polakov, 27 years old, and his young wife Anna, arrived on the SS United States. As second-class passengers, they went through formalities within a few hours in New Jersey, rather than Ellis Island where most immigrants were processed. Unlike many on the SS United States in late 1906, Polakov possessed more than $500 and a hotel booking, demonstrating not only their preparedness but also their relative wealth. Seemingly intent on eschewing the burgeoning Russian enclaves but rather, blending in with the local intelligentsia, Vladimir became Walter as soon as they left the pier, where first- and second-class immigrants were processed. He never referred to his birth name again.

Polakov came from the Russian urban intelligentsia. He was born in 1879 in St Petersburg of an elite family. His father was a senior judge and his mother, Anna Aleksandrovna Polyakova-Khvostova, was an artiste. Young Polakov moved in the best circles, where art, music, literature, and politics were discussed and debated – the salons and clubs were full of young men and women debating philosophies or corruption or planning revolutions (Anderson, 2015; Boterbloem, Usitalo, & Whisenhunt, 2013; Bushkovitch, 2011; Christian, 1997; Walker, 1994). There was a great awareness of flowering of political ideas overflowing from Europe and taking a Russian flavor, so that stories of the day in Paris were also stories of the month in St Petersburg and Moscow. In part, this was because there was considerable movement of the rich and the intelligentsia between Russia and the rest of Europe (Weiler, 2014). Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky had even written and dedicated his most famous song to Polakov’s mother, Aline, in the 1860s (Anon, n.d.; Sylvester, 2004, pp. 25–26).

Polakov thus had a comfortable childhood, despite being bedridden for many years as a child, seemingly with a hip disease. On the ship’s manifest on his arrival in New York City in 1906, he was listed as having one short leg, and he certainly had a pronounced limp throughout his life. His government employment records stated baldly that he was “lame in one leg.” Nevertheless as part of the Russian ruling class, he had opportunities for learning, reading, and debating, and also had attained a good education. At the age of 20, he left Moscow for Dresden to study engineering at the respected Royal Saxon Polytechnic Institute (Königlich-Sächsisches Polytechnikum), with its prestigious and rapidly developing engineering school (Harwood, 2006). Dresden in the fin de siècle was seething politically, and Polakov quite possibly heard fiery Rosa Luxemburg who was in Dresden around the same time (Nettl, 1966, p. 8). In his early years in the Taylor Society, Polakov sometimes quoted Luxemburg and, more often, her friend, socialist, political philosopher, August Bebel. Their influence on an idealistic young engineer around 1900 in northern Germany is no surprise.

In 1902, Polakov returned to Russia and attended Moscow University. Details varied about what he did there. He later claimed that he had studied industrial hygiene, or occupational safety and health, or psychiatry, the details varied. Polakov’s interests in these subjects perhaps sprang from the curriculum of the engineering course in Dresden where human needs and economic and social matters were taught from the 1880s. Although industrial psychology was embryonic in Europe and the United States from the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was set within burgeoning renewed fascination with science and technology and their implications for the human mind (Bushkovitch, 2011; Rutherford, 2017; Todes, 1981).

What is perhaps more interesting is how Polakov might have managed the further study he claimed which he had done at Moscow University, given the jobs he also later claimed he held. It seems that not long after his return to Russia, he began as an engineer at Tula Locomotive works, in a rural area nearly 200 kilometers south of Moscow. Even in 1904, the region was politically very active, and Polakov, an avowed Marxist, undoubtedly joined the other fiery educated youth in the years prior to the failed revolution of 1905. Later in life, he recalled spending the occasional night in jail or being arrested for political activity, although he assured FBI agents interviewing him 40 years later that he had never been charged for any activities arising from his youthful enthusiasm. It is nevertheless notable that the young firebrand sought to emigrate to the United States not long after the failed Russian revoltion of 1905, when participants were still being arrested and jailed for the uprising. Polakov also later said he had held a senior engineer’s job in the navy but the details were thin (FBI File on Polakov, 1947, 100-16824, 30 December, p. 8).

It is probable that even before the turn of the century Polakov spoke French, German, and Russian. Indeed in the US government employment record, he also listed Croatian as one of the languages which he knew well. Certainly his publications sometimes drew on sources in French or German, such as his 1925 article on “Carbon Dioxide as an Index of Fatigue” (Polakov, 1925d, pp. 1043–1046). As scholars have noted, the Russian intelligentsia were often multilingual with an appreciation of many of the arts and sciences to be found elsewhere in Europe. After university education in Germany and a young life in glittering circles in Russia, Vladimir would have moved in those circles (Walker, 1994). As his later business ventures in the 1920s suggest, (see Chapter 3), his language skills proved useful in consulting, selling, and patenting lighting equipment in Europe, perhaps with the assistance of his brother who lived in Belgium (Fedyashin, 2012; Polakov, 1928a, 1928b, 1928c).

The Context: New York City in Early Twentieth Century

Whatever young Vladimir had done in his youth, New York City in 1906 must have been astonishing. It was not only that New York was larger – and it was twice the size of Moscow – but also it was booming with great self-awareness as a grand and growing city. The 20-storey Flatiron building had been built a few years before Polakov arrived, and by 1908, there were 366 tall buildings with 9 or more floors. However by 1913, these too were dwarfed by the Singer Building where Gantt had an office on the 29th Floor. Like the Met Life Building and the Woolworth Building, the Singer Building had more than 45 storeys (Wallace, 2017, pp. 143–155).

It was a stirring and exciting time. Over the three decades between 1890 and 1920, Americans became more mobile than ever before, with trains across the continent, and faster steamships regularly from Europe and beyond. The New York subway opened its first line in 1904 to Harlem, the start of a great habit of mobility in long narrow Manhattan and the other New York City Boroughs (Stalter-Pace, 2012; Wallace, 2017, pp. 227–240), while increasing numbers of high-line trains and trams provided more and more accessible transport. Also, there had been a revolution in communication with wireless telegraphy, readily available telephones, and parcel post all coming into common use around the turn of the century. Much of these depended on the rapid development of electricity generation and distribution in the early years of the twentieth century. Not only did this bring changes to manufacturing, but also meant changes in daily life through expansion of electrical equipment. For the people of New York, gas lighting was still preferred over electric lighting in 1905, but the city was famous for its neon signs and as early as 1913, Times Square was world famous for its garish lights. Out at Coney Island, where the new leisure industry was booming, one of its chief attractions was Luna Park where 1.3 million lights made night as bright as the day (Wallace, 2017, pp. 143–155).

On the ground, New York City was teeming with immigrants, especially Italians and Russians, who came to New York City in huge numbers. Six million came to the United States between 1900 and 1908, putting major pressures on housing and infrastructure. For sharp author and political philosopher, Herbert Croly, New York City could be one of the world’s great cities but for its “unusual proportion of raw and unapproachable foreigners” (Wallace, 2017, p. 342). And, he later added, the lack of attention paid to its social infrastructure, compared with its focus on financial and industrial affairs, was another barrier to greatness (Wallace, 2017, p. 505). Croly was perhaps a trifle critical. Greater New York had outstanding public transport, and, for example, consumed massive amounts of water and energy to meet the needs of its burgeoning population. Wallace claimed that 370 million gallons of water and 50,000 tons of coal were needed every day (Wallace, 2017, pp. 205– 206). Transport was growing steadily, if not quite apace with rapid population growth. There was a feeling of expansion and strength in these developments, as well as other infrastructure growth such as the significant bridge building. Several huge new bridges linked the five boroughs, and new ferry terminals highlighted the outward looking aspect of the growing city (Wallace, 2017).

Things were darker down in the tenements of Lower East Side where the poorest families lived, densely packed in appalling and unhealthy conditions. Such conditions did not stem the ceaseless flow of immigration through the first decades of the twentieth century. Between 1880 and 1919, 17 million people entered the country through the port of New York and the city grew at 5 per cent or more through the most years in 1890s and 1900s. Even though the tide was slower, over a million immigrants arrived from Europe in Polakov’s first year in the United States, and many, like him, wanted to stay in New York City.

Efficiency and Scientific Management in the Progressive Era

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the predominant ideas of the day came under the banner of Progressivism, which had much to say about immigration, albeit not all positive. Scholars rarely agree on precisely what Progressivism comprised, so it depends on which attributes are given most weighting (Abrams, 1978; Anderson, 2016; Kolko, 1962, pp. 279–288; Pastorello, 2014). For example, some have argued Progressivism could be distinguished between two groups with different motives but with shared ideals –idealist middle-class reformers, such as Jane Addams establishing and aiding settlements, and the rich merchants such as Morgan and Rockefeller aiming to minimise disruption and radicalism by accommodating some of the new collectivist and egalitarian ideas sweeping through the working classes. Anderson (2016) has shown that Progressivism was not so much a movement but more a series of modernist projects with several arms. She cites Ayers, Gould, Oshinsky, and Soderlund (2005) in asserting that a driving assumption of Progressivism was that:

humanity could be perfected, that new industrial societies, while prosperous and optimistic, required intervention to raise the conditions of life to some minimum level, and that it was the obligation of the government to do all it could to reach that goal. (Ayers et al., 2005, p. 612 cited in Anderson, 2016, p. 38)

Polakov arrived in the United States at precisely the right time to become a trusted scientific manager and efficient engineer. The notions of Progressivism, together with the expansion of unions and the push to improve work and productivity, all combined at a time when political ideas were in a flux. Some came with strong values and strong opinions of the insightful muckraker journalists, or from the efforts of the articulate ultra-rich business men like J. P. Morgan or J. Rockefeller. For those of many ideological persuasions in urban United States, it was the golden era of modernism when the progress of humankind seemed inexorable and universal. In particular, science and engineering were the drivers of progress and efficiency (French, 2017; Pastorello, 2014).

This was also the Efficiency Era in the United States, but the same ideals had been permeating much of the industrial world for two or three decades. Haber (1964, pp. 99–116) argues that the notions of efficiency, already widely acceptable, became even more popular in the Progressive Era. But of course, efficiency is also a broad term that can have many contested meanings. Across the United States also in 1900s and 1910s, the “efficiency craze” concealed the contested conceptualisations, ranging from personal efficiency to economic and technical efficiency measured through costs or amount of materials. In the workplace and organisation, the essence of “efficiency,” also known variously as “human engineering” or “scientific management,” drew on the utterly modernist notions that technology of itself was a necessary but not sufficient element of progress. Rather, finance and factory design, and indeed work itself, were being shaped to make the most of the technological and human progress evident, so far. Such was the fertile ground on which scientific management developed (see also Dinerstein, 1914; Leonard, 2008, especially pp. 119–124).

Frederick Winslow Taylor and Close Associates

The history of scientific management in the early twentieth century is littered with multiple perspectives and interpretations, including those of influential scholars such as Gramsci, Zinn, and Braverman. What follows is not so much historiographical analysis but rather an overview of one mainstream perspective that has been extant, probably since Robert Hoxie wrote the Report Scientific Management and Labor (Hoxie, 1920; see Nyland, 1996 for details of Hoxie’s suicide shortly after he published the report). For its detractors, scientific management was a system of control and exploitation, always anti-worker, or at best rigid, unthinking and uncaring of workers. Certainly, a selective reading of Taylor provides some evidence for detractors. Taylor was the proponent and founding father of what Louis Brandeis is believed to have first labelled, “scientific management” in preparation for the Eastern Rates Case (Drury, 1915, pp. 17–23). Taylor was rather caustic about intellectual demands of work like shovelling, and seemed to his critics to convey those attitudes to the workers themselves. Often critics quote Taylor’s crassly expressed ideas about improving Schmidt’s capacity for work, even though he was a “dull ox” or doing the work of a “trained gorilla” (Taylor, 2012).

And to some extent, such epithets are telling. There is no doubt that Taylor was a scientist, first and foremost. As a largely self-taught polymath, Taylor invented methods for tempering and strengthening steel, collaborated with his professional colleagues, Henry Laurence Gantt and Carl G. Barth on patenting technical equipment. Yet he still had time to be a notable swimmer and golfer competing at national and international levels. But – and here the detractors are correct – Taylor’s abiding interest was technical efficiency. He sought to harness and enhance ideas about production and ways to make work efficient, not to deskill, nor make workers substitutable nor to intensify work, but simply to achieve technical efficiency.

By the turn of the century, Taylor had completed several major projects at and beyond the famous Midvale Steel experiment, and had gathered around himself a core group of engineer – managers to build and sustain his philosophy and practice. They too admired the possibilities of organising production around facts, around investigating and researching technical, social, financial and managerial processes, and around planning. Most notable were socialist mathematician Barth, Taylorist public administrator, Cooke, Taylor’s first associate at Midvale Steel, Gantt, and, consulting engineer and scientific management stalwart, Horace King Hathaway.

Polakov met some of these within months of his arrival in the United States. It seems most likely that he first met efficiency engineer, Emerson. Shortly after that, he also worked for Gantt at American Locomotive (ALCo) company, where both Gantt and Emerson had been employed as consultants. Given Polakov’s engineering qualifications and interests in industrial hygiene, it seems likely that he sought them out. Both Gantt and Emerson were clearly taken with this well-qualified young idealist Russian, with his excellent knowledge of engineering and his ambition to make the world a better place. Together with Charles Day, a foundation member of the Taylor Society, these engineers mentored and employed the young engineer from early in his working life in the United States.

In this respect, it is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Russian Engineer Comes to New York, 1905–1915
• Chapter 2. The Engineers Should Rule – Taylor Society and the New Machine, 1915–1920
• Chapter 3. Two Books for the 1920s
• Chapter 4. Taking the Gantt Chart to the Soviet Union and a Roller Coaster Return, 1928–1937
• Chapter 5. The Scientific Manager Joins the Union and Is Harried by the FBI, 1937–1948
• Chapter 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index